Thursday, 27 December 2012

Before we move to the main dish, a few remarks on the criteria for inclusion. As this post on defining political bloggers makes clear, a blog is a website produced by an individual or collective organised primarily around user-generated content, and has a comments facility.

There are a couple of other caveats. To be included below, the blog or blogger has to be posting regularly (within the last 45 days) and has to be contributing to something that identifies itself as a blog, regardless of whether it's a traditional blogging platform, something bespoke, or a site hosted by an established media organisation. Lastly, the writer has to define themselves as a blogger. For example, while prominent columnists like Suzanne Moore and Richard Littlejohn appear on mainstream media sites that exhibit the architecture one would associate with blogging, they do not - as far as I'm aware - regard themselves as bloggers nor engage with the comments left below their articles.

There are lots of things that are striking about this list. But two that really jumped out while I was compiling it was the woeful under representation of women. The second is how the list, and especially its upper reaches, are utterly dominated by professional journalists and bloggers that have broken onto mainstream media platforms. This is the continuation of a trend I first discussed in the 2010 list. If we're honest, the list reads more like a who's who of political journalists and opinion formers than anything else. So maybe next year I'll throw together a list of independent bloggers, which excludes the journos and bloggers who write more or less exclusively for media sites. Who knows? Maybe that will be just enough to see my humble Twitter feed sneak back into the top 100.

Of course, as is the nature of these things the endeavour to be complete often means someone was inadvertently left out. If you think a tweeting blogger has been overlooked, let me know in the comments below.

So, any surprises? Did you make the list?

Update 29.12.12
It turns out the first draft was very comprehensive indeed and only failed to capture three active tweeting bloggers that have enough followers for the list. It's now updated, meaning Aaron Peters, Obo the Clown and Crash, Bang, Wallace are booted off by Cyber Boris (Angela Neptustar), Danny Blanchflower and the recently-returned Iain Dale.

I would have thought it's pretty obvious seeing as this is a UK-based blog that spends most of its time talking about UK-based political and cultural issues, AND that all of the people on this list also talk about UK politics and other related UK issues.

But there is another observation to be made - where are the Irish, Welsh and Scottish bloggers? Bella Caledonia, with just shy of 5,100 followers when I compiled this missed out on a place by a whisker. Are there others I've missed?

Phil dear, last year I was omitted from your list, even though my tweets and number of blogs meant I should be on there. When I told you, you said you would put me on next year.

This year it is the same story, i am still not on the list. You regret that there are so few women on the list but I hope you did not mean only Labour women. I do not think you would be so unfair as to exclude me for two years running because I am a Tory, so hope you are fair enough to amend the list as you promised yesterday, thanks so much Phil.

Many thanks for including me, but I am really far more of a legal blogger than a politics one; and if you don't include (say) law bloggers on contemporary issues like Carl Gardner or Adam Wagner then perhaps no point including me.